The Monday Roundup: ‘Doughnut city’, unhinged cops, B2V, and more

The problem is exactly that though. So every pedestrian with a smartphone is now “safe”, but children, or people who can’t afford, or choose not to be tracked by big tech are not. They will get blamed in the police reports for “not traveling with the NTSB Safety Chip technology”. This is exactly what we see with helmets today, and those aren’t even legally mandated in most states.

Ah, ok. So I think that’s where we differ. I haven’t given up on holding drivers responsible for their actions. You correctly identified the key difference between the aviation industry’s safety culture and American auto culture. One is full of professionals that hold themselves to a high standard and the other is given a pass at every possible point. In fact pilots are rightly angry that Boeing felt they could implement a software that overrode and contradicted their judgment and training.

We need drivers to be more skilled and responsible. And they should pay in both time and money for the privilege to train to use an undeniably dangerous form of transportation in a safe manner. I don’t want to walk or ride around with a phone transmitting my proximity to every car for fear that the unskilled and inattentive driver will run me down. I realize phones and their tracking capabilities are ubiquitous, my concern isn’t a data privacy one. More one of proportionality and of victim blaming. It perpetuates the largely untrue assertion that bike and pedestrian collisions are effectively unavoidable for drivers. “They came out of nowhere”, if only they were responsible and had their phone app turned on. Drivers need to wake up and shoulder some responsibility.

The two fatal 737-Max crashes didn’t take place in the US, but they easily could have… And Boeing, who created those death-planes (need I remind you?) is based in Washington.

Sadly Indonesia has a terrible flight safety record and the reason that 737 crashed was a faulty refurbished AOA sensor along with the Boeing software. The reason there were no US crashes was the airlines in the US airlines paid for the extra AOA sensor, better aircrew training, and a better safety culture. The Ethiopian crash was caused once again by a failed AOA sensor and pilot error by not following the checklist supplied (they skipped the 1st step) by Boeing after the first crash. While many developing countries have a worse safety record than the US even they are improving much faster than automobile, bike or pedestrian.

It is my understanding that these are not the accepted interpretations of the ultimate causes of the 737 MAX crashes. In particular the Ethiopian Air crash, what was checklist procedure that they disregarded? I thought they were basically screwed and did all they could given the info and training they had. I’m genuinely asking, because I hadn’t heard about the checklist oversight.

Maintenance in the case of the Lion Air crash was certainly a factor as the plane’s single malfunctioning Angle of Attack sensor (a Boeing supplied/approved product no less) was replaced with an incorrectly calibrated unit. But this was still an indication of a design, training, and software flaw. And it should have been handled differently by Boeing in terms of recommended training and notice bulletins to pilots, as well as ground crew, that were not supplied. Without knowledge of the system and a way to permanently disable it after a sensor malfunction, the pilots were placed in a very difficult situation.

Even the “upgraded” sensor package with two AOA sensors, as was seen in in the later Ethiopian crash, would not have helped since MCAS’s implementation at the time was to use only one sensor and not error check with the other.

The pilots in the Ethiopian Air crash where well aware of the MCAS issues and knew to switch off the electronic auto trim, and did so after correctly identifying the MCAS system was malfunctioning (it triggered twice just after takeoff adjusting the trim to an unsafe position given the airspeed and true AoA). But this excess airspeed (again caused by incorrect use by Boeing of a single sensor input for auto throttle) resulted in the manual trim adjustment screw to jam and become effectively unresponsive. Seemingly in desperation to return the trim to an acceptable setting they turned the electronic trim control back on and the 3rd MCAS intervention sent them into an unrecoverable dive. When other pilots recreated these conditions in simulators they too found the response of the plane difficult to understand and cope with even though they had the benefit of hindsight into the specific issue.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200310004955/http://www.aib.gov.et/wp-content/uploads/2020/documents/accident/ET-302%20%20Interim%20Investigation%20%20Report%20March%209%202020.pdf

Basically Boeing never asked the question: If this one AOA sensor fails, particularly on takeoff, will our new software designed to reduce pilot training requirements, and by definition we aren’t training pilots on, try to kill them in a confusing and relentless way?

This is why it’s a better, though still a bit tortured, aviation industry analogy to the push for bike-to-car sensor tech. Instead of focusing on driver training (or even more straightforward tech solutions like GPS based speed limiters), the auto industry is pulling the old “jaywalking menace” on the cycling world by implying that it’s cyclist who should through increasingly convoluted ways announce themselves to drivers in order to not be maimed or killed. If we aren’t training drivers to use cars safely now, are we going to include a checklist for when their Bike proximity sensor suite fails?

Thanks! I didn’t realize the upgrade that US airlines presumably paid for was an indicator for AoA sensor mismatch. I thought it was the sensor itself being the extra. The Ethiopian report talks a lot about the mismatch of the two, so I assumed they had the upgrade.

I still think the pilot error take is more than a bit harsh. Obviously pilot actions are a component in almost every air crash. But as is covered in another ST article linked in the one you posted, the runaway stabilizer bulletin might have been insufficient, especially for younger pilots, not just less experienced ones on later model 737s.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeings-emergency-procedure-for-737-max-may-have-failed-on-ethiopian-flight/

The bulletin referring to a checklist for a similar but different issue, runaway stabilizer, didn’t convey the gravity of the, if you need to do stabilizer adjustments do them now or you won’t be able to later, nature of the first step of the checklist. They needed far more training and sim time, specifically with MCAS. But also with the roller coaster maneuver early 737 pilots learned for the 737-200 to temporarily relieve pressure on the screw mechanism to allow for manual adjustment. But like I said, the whole point of MCAS was to obviate extra training. So Boeing was not going to do that.